Wiki-style alternative to mark-up in posts

[aphenine]

Title:
Wiki-style alternative to mark-up in posts

Area:
posting

Summary:
DW allows the use of HTML tags in entries and also has its own tags for use. However, most of these tags are quite long to write, and formatting lists properly in HTML means switching off auto-formatting and doing everything manually. As a compromise, it would be useful if DW provided an option to use Wiki style mark-up for posting.

Description:
Dreamwidth currently allows HTML in posts, and also has a simple autoformatting option to handle straight text, plus provides its own tags to enable site features (e.g. cuts, usernames).

These features are pretty awesome in general and I would not want to touch them, however they have a few annoyances.

For example, the user tag takes lots of typing to use and HTML in general is not the most compact language for formatting. Plus HTML formatting is broken by the autoformatter, meaning either one has to switch it off and do everything by hand, or not use it.

Wikis have this same formatting problems with HTML, and they fix this by providing their own set of mark-up that is simple and quick to use and has become standardised over different sites. It's easy and its well known.

This simple mark-up system can be adopted quite successfully to fix the same problem in Dreamwidth. By providing an option to use Wiki mark-up in Dreamwidth users could:

use [[username]] to refer to a username and [[lj:username]] to refer to off-site usernames, saving a lot of typing;
use * and # to generate bulletted and numbered lists automatically;
use ==Heading== to provide some heading (although, we don't really need nested heading levels, do we?);

Plus any other useful features that other users can think of.

There would be an issue in using [http://www.awebsite.org|The Website I am linking to] to refer to external sites as people do use square brackets in entries, but I think leaving that out and using automatic url parsing would be appropriate.

Likewise, DW could create some of its own Wiki conventions appropriate to a blogging site.

Poll #3895 Wiki-style alternative to mark-up in posts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
4 (6.8%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (8.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
44 (74.6%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (10.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

By "autoformatter" do you mean the rich text editor, or the regular formatting that the html editor does (linebreaks and such). In case of the latter I never noticed that html-usage was problematic. (and from what I understand the rich text editor is some sort of horrible blight or something that nobody mentions or expects to work? I've only seen it break people's posts.)

And what would happen if I want to use symbols like # or * in another way? like for issue numbers or marking emphasis or emoticons with * and they happen to be at the beginning of a new line? Would I need to type nowiki escape tags all the time? I have already trouble that I have to type the angular html brackets as html-entity sometimes because it omits them thinking I did markup. I'm dubious having even more special character behavior would be convenient.

[havocthecat]

I think it also might be horribly confusing for those who don't use wiki markup. :(

[existence]

Yeah, this is part of the suggestion I'm wondering about: how many people are more familiar with wiki markup versus HTML?

(Personally, I've used HTML off and on for over ten years at this point, and have only occasionally used Wiki markup for about a third of that time, so my bias is for HTML, but.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I know wiki markup, but I'm not sure it would be so great. I mean, would '' '' make something italic? ''' ''' bold? : indent? --- make a line? Will a leading space at the beginning of a line disable reformatting? there are lots of unintended effects that can happen. When I add to a wiki I often need a preview toget the formatting right.

[melannen]

Private wikis are getting used more and more for some kinds of projects, so it's possible there's a growing pool of people who are wiki-savvy without being very web-savvy - but private wikis tend to use different software (and thus different markup) than Wikimedia's system. So being familiar with a wiki doesn't necessarily mean they'd know the right one...

[kyrielle]

This. I don't use wiki markup, but I do use asterisks for emphasis. And I've had no problem putting whatever html markup I wanted in an entry.

As far as the [[lj:username]] thing - what about non-lj sites, etc?

What about those of us who are using a journal/blog, not a wiki, and are surprised when our brackets are changed? Or older posts - like this one - talking about wiki markup might suddenly be affected also.

[ratcreature]

Also wasn't there a previous suggestion to simplefy the name formatting with some twitter convention? How many simplefied syntax are there going to be?

[feathertail]

I remember that!

I think some kind of simplification would be good -- some way to style your entries and link to things easily, without needing to know HTML or mess with the clunky editor. I'm not sure Wiki-style is what's needed, though.

[cesy]

The extra line-breaks can be an issue if you're hand-coding a list - it adds in extra br tags where you don't want them.

[ratcreature]

That's true. In the rare cases I do list I usually write them first with line breaks for easier editing, and then delete shortly before posting. I think this minor inconvenience is less than having unexpected formattings suddenly appear because I say typed

*grins*

on a separate line and it got formatted with a bullet point.

[cesy]

I would like the asterisk or hash list formatting at the beginning of a line, but I think the rest of the markup would be confusing, given the potential for things to be interpreted as markup that weren't meant that way.

[melannen]

I *hate* wiki markup - and I've learned three different wikis with three different systems of markup, and I hate them all. In trying to be 'simple' it inevitably results in doing things I never meant it to do, and I always have to look for utterly non-intuitive directions to make it do the things I do want it to do.

Wiki markups can be better than HTML for some specific styles of writing and use cases, but not all.

And since people are going to have to learn to use an overcomplicated, non-intuitive system one way or another, might as well stick with the standard: html.

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[snakeling]

+1

[ct]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[ursamajor]

This. Thissetty this this this.

[florahart]

+1, or if relative amount of plusness, +50. I'm pretty sure there's not a word in English for my level of dislike for wiki markup in all of the places I have tried to use it.

...Although I don't actually find html nonintuitive anyway, because my first word processor used something so similar to html that I've essentially been using it since 1989, and since the tags have English meanings that make sense (to an English speaker), it's better than wiki, though I will agree that to a non-English speaker that might not be true.

[musyc]

+1 Not to mention that learning HTML markup comes in handy across the internet and Wiki markup only comes in handy on a minimal amount of sites.

[goodbyebird]

+1

[kerravonsen]

If this is implemented, it should use Creole markup (see http://www.wikicreole.org/).

But I'm not so sure that it should be implemented: there seem to be too many potential gotchas.
1. Breaking existing entries
2. What about crossposting? The other sites won't understand this markup.
3. There doesn't seem to be a way of making it optional.

[afuna]

Re: crossposting, we do some additional processing when crossposting an entry, so we could do something like that here as well.

[afuna]

My with changes: have it be an option, the way that HTML/RTE currently is. So a third one up there.

[ursamajor]

Hmm. I just went all "Ugh, no" up there, but that's because I was assuming it would be wiki markup (for however many values of potentially standard wiki markup there are) put into the HTML editor. I think this option would dial my reaction back down to mongoose (I wouldn't use it, others might, but how niche of an option is this/is using wiki markup more accessible to a potential creator than using HTML?).

[afuna]

I'm worried about having too many options up there, but I suspect that if you just try to use wiki parsing on all possible text, it would probably mess up a bunch of stuff

(I'd love to have it for lists /lazy)

[kareila]

What about instead of a third editor frame, another checkbox next to Disable Autoformatting? Could call it "Allow Wiki Markup" or some such, with a helplink to the allowed syntax.

[afuna]

Hmm, that works for me.

[thorfinn]

I like it - there's already an RTF editor.

The trick is that then you've got three editors (four if you include the "no-autoformat tickybox" as a separate editor), and the wiki-like editor would have to be directly inter-compatible with the existing ones.

I think this would have to come with Significant Editor Improvements all around - I don't think there's a clear canonical form, for example, which would be necessary to pass between editors.

Not a bad thing to have, but definitely a lot of tricky work to get right without causing problems with existing data.

[zeborah]

If it was an option coeval with html and RTE, maybe, but my suspicion is that this would be too much work for too little gain in comparison to other things that could be done in the same coder time.

I'm pretty fluent in both html and wikimedia markup and like both, but... when I was setting up a wiki at work, my colleagues were by-and-large as confused by the wiki markup as by html. Possibly more. The wiki never took off until we got one with RTE.

I'd like to revisit this

[tamouse]

While wiki markup can seem problematic for a lot of reasons (one being, *which* wiki markup do you choose?) another text-based markup is markdown, which is even simpler. (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)

Markdown is already pretty intuitive for anyone ho uses e-mail. It's nowhere near as complicated as any wiki markup I've seen. Libraries exist for translating markdown into a variety of formats.